Suzanne, a young woman in San Francisco, met a man—call him John—on the dating site OKCupid. John was attractive and charming. More notably, he indulged in the kind of profligate displays of affection which signal a definite eagerness to commit. He sneaked Suzanne’s favorite snacks into her purse as a workday surprise and insisted early on that she keep a key to his apartment. He asked her to help him choose a couch and then spooned with her on all the floor models. He even accompanied her, unprompted, to the D.M.V.—an act roughly equivalent, in today’s gallantry currency, to Perseus rescuing Andromeda from the sea monster.
An illustration of an iPhone beaming pink cartoon hearts towards someone
Dating “often feels like the worst, most precarious form of contemporary labor: an unpaid internship,” Moira Weigel writes.Illustration by Alain Pilon

As we learn from the podcast “Reply All,” which reported the tale, Suzanne was not the only woman on whom John had chosen to bestow his favor. Six months into their relationship, she discovered that he was seeing half a dozen other women, one of whom he’d been stringing along for two years. All of them had received the couch-spooning treatment. John was a champion girlfriend accumulator, the ringmaster of a romantic circus that only he could see. Every so often, one of his paramours would catch on and alert the others. Then he’d block them all on social media and begin the whole thing again.